Stewart Filibusters Thiessen

The left blogosphere is working the spin on the Jon Stewart - Marc Thiessen encounter last night, insisting that Stewart "destroyed" and "nailed" Thiessen. That's not the way it looked to me.

The left blogosphere is working the spin on the Jon Stewart- Marc Thiessen encounter last night, insisting that Stewart "destroyed" and "nailed" Thiessen.

That's not the way it looked to me. Stewart interrupted Thiessen, overtalked Thiessen, lectured Thiessen. He pointedly reminded Thiessen that Thiessen was a guest on his, Stewart's, show. (In real life, a host has an obligation to defer to the guest, but on TV it works the other way around.) Yet he did not catch Thiessen in a contradiction, or expose a weakness in his argument, or reveal in him any ignorance of the facts, as for example Stewart did do in his interview with Betsy McCaughey last year.

What seems to have happened in the Stewart-Thiessen encounter is that Stewart overlearned his lesson from his encounter with John Yoo earlier in the year.

Yoo prevailed in that encounter, or so it seemed to me, because of Yoo's virtues of character. He is gentle, thoughtful, and patient. But Stewart and his fans decided different. Yoo prevailed because Stewart was under-briefed.

Not with Thiessen! Stewart could have filled the whole interview by reading his briefing notes. Which as a matter of fact is precisely what he did. There was very little encounter, very little exchange, very little debate.

Thiessen gamely tried to assert his case in the interstices of Stewart's lecture. I'm not sure that was the right interview strategy. My instinct, had I been sitting in his chair, would have been to lean back and let Stewart go for a good long spell, wait for him to draw breath, and then ask:

"Jon, are you going to read ALL your briefing notes? In that case I could have stayed home and watched the show in my pajamas. But since I'm here anyway, isn't there ANYTHING you'd like to ask me?"